Gangsters also enjoyed Broward's sunny climate

Lots of people wanted to escape the cold of New York, Chicago and Detroit, so why should mobsters be any different?

During the 1930s and continuing past World War II, Meyer Lansky and his brother Jake ran posh gambling houses in Hallandale Beach and Hollywood.

When Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa disappeared in 1975, Anthony Provenzano, an alleged capo in the Genovese crime family, held an impromptu news conference outside his home in Hallandale Beach's Golden Isles neighborhood. Philadelphia boss Nicodemo Scarfo kept a four-bedroom, waterfront home in Fort Lauderdale, where he tied up his 40-foot yacht Casablanca.

At Fort Lauderdale's Galt Ocean Mile in the 1970s and 80s, FBI agents conducted surveillance on the comings and goings of Gus Alex, a high-ranking member of the Chicago mob. When the FBI arrested Chicago mob boss Sam Carlisi in 1992, he was about to board a plane to return to his home in Weston.

When the FBI arrested Nicholas Corozzo, then-head of the Gambino family, in 1996, they charged him with supervising a loan-sharking operation out of a check-cashing store in Deerfield Beach.

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Happy Birthday — and when was that again?

County officials are celebrating Broward's 100th birthday on Oct. 1, 2015. But is that the correct date?

Do an online search and you may find sites, including the typically reliable Wikipedia, that list the date of Broward's incorporation as April 30, 1915.

So which is it?

In all their wisdom, county officials are right. Broward came into being on Oct. 1, 1915. So decreed the 1915 state Legislature: "That the County of Broward be and the same is hereby created and established to exist as a county in the State of Florida from and after the first day of October, 1915."

Why the confusion?

The Legislature, which meets in the spring, voted to create Broward on April 30, designating Oct. 1 as its first day of existence.

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Milk mogul harnessed the power of cows

It may be right there on your refrigerator shelf: That familiar red-and-white carton bearing the logo, "McArthur Farms."

But it's more than just something to pour on your cereal. The dairy, one of the state's largest and most modern, was established in 1929 in Hollywood by James Neville McArthur, who was born on a farm in rural Mississippi.

McArthur grew his herd to about 10,000 head at its peak and along the way became a noted philanthropist, establishing the J.N. McArthur Foundation and helping fund Florida's Turnpike and McArthur High School in Hollywood.

McArthur died in 1972. Today, his namesake dairy is based in Okeechobee and is home to about 8,500 cows.

In the spring of 1915, when the state Legislature decided to break up what was then known as Dade County and create a separate county, the new tract was to be named for its most notable – and sizable – feature: the Everglades.

It only makes sense, since two-thirds of what eventually became Broward County is part of the Everglades.

But State Rep. Ion Farris, a Jacksonville Democrat, was speaker of the House. Using that position, he pushed through a name switch, dubbing the new county Broward, after Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, Florida's governor from 1905 to 1909.

Farris was a friend of Gov. Broward, and also endorsed draining the Everglades for agriculture.

He had another connection to the Governor's mansion: his nephew, C. Farris Bryant, served as governor from 1961 to 1965.

With such a grand moniker, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, who gave Broward County its name, was bound to be a bigger than life character.

He didn't disappoint.

Broward was Florida's governor from 1905 until 1909, and was responsible for starting to drain the Everglades – "the fabulous muck" he called it – to grow vegetables, barge them to Fort Lauderdale, and ship them north via rail.

Before that, however, the Jacksonville resident was a populist rabble rouser, sheriff and riverboat captain. He also smuggled munitions and insurgents into Cuba before the Spanish-American War, and salvaged shipwrecks in the Keys.

He died in 1910 at age 53 from gallstones, after having put off surgery for the affliction.

Polynesia on the New River

Broward County had an early flirtation with film celebrities in 1919, when noted director D. W. Griffith, of "Birth of a Nation" fame, came to Fort Laduerdale to shoot "The Idol Dancer."

He transformed the New River into a lush, South Seas island set and hired locals, including members of the Seminole tribe, who portrayed Polynesian natives. The film was a tale of romance, missionaries and attacking islanders.

The star, Clarine Seymour, played the waifish half-native girl White Almond Flower, torn in love between a gin-swilling beachcomber and sickly American. The beachcomber, who reformed, won her heart. Groomed by Griffith for stardom, she died in 1920, the year the movie was released, at age 21.

A diverse beginning

Broward County is home to a mixed bag of people, and has been from the start.

When the railroad was extended to the area in the 1890s, land companies encouraged immigrants to buy and cultivate the land.

From the Northeast came Swedes, who settled in Hallandale. Danes from the Midwest named a new city after themselves: Dania. Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach were homes to farmers from the South.

Working the land were blacks, who were brought in from the South or the Bahamas.

Of course, the Tequesta Indians were the first residents here, dating to about 4,000 years ago. They were nearly wiped out by disease from the Spanish, or warfare with the powerful Calusa tribe from West Florida. Only about 80 Tequesta were left in Broward in 1763, and they departed for Cuba when Spain ceded the area to Britain at the end of the Frend and Indian War.

A new adventure in shopping

Shoppers trekked from across Broward County to browse the shelves at the Burdines department store, which opened in November 1947 in downtown Fort Lauderdale.

The four-story building at the corner of Andrews Avenue and Southwest 2nd Street was the third branch of the Miami-based Burdines chain, and one of the first new department stores to open in the U.S. after World War II.

The 48,775-square-foot building featured air conditioning, a welcome novelty at the time. A 24-bell carillon on its roof played music throughout the day and struck the time each half hour.

Most of the store's 150 employees were locals who underwent two weeks of training.

The store closed in 1980, when a new Burdines opened at the Galleria Mall. The building was renovated, and today it's the Broward County Governmental Center.

The beach along today's Hugh Taylor Birch State Park was a desolate spot on Oct. 7, 1876, when Washington Jenkins was dispatched there as first keeper of a House of Refuge for shipwrecked sailors.

The U.S. Life-Saving Service, which later merged into the Coast Guard, built it as one of a string of outposts along Florida's east coast to rescue sailors. Living there with his wife and children, Jenkins was given the job of roaming the beaches north and south of the site after storms to look for shipwreck survivors.

An 1879 report said the houses of refuge along Florida's east coast "contemplate no other life saving operations than affording succor to shipwrecked persons who may be cast ashore, and who, in the absence of such means of relief, would be liable to perish from hunger and thirst in that desolate region," according to the Coast Guard's History Program.

The house of refuge was later moved to a spot near today's Bahia Mar Fort Lauderdale Beach Hotel. It became Coast Guard Base 6 in 1924, and today the Coast Guard retains a building there.

It will come as no surprise that the land north and south of Fort Lauderdale's Las Olas Boulevard did not naturally arrange itself into narrow finger isles that maximized the amount of waterfront real estate.

Men with big dreams and large dredges attacked the mangrove swamps early in the 20th century, dredging up fill to create the land on which so many expensive houses stand today.

The first to be created was the Idlewyld neighborhood, developed in 1919 by Allen Hortt and his partners Bob Dye and Tom Stilwell, publisher of the Fort Lauderdale Daily News and Fort Lauderdale Sentinel.

They created a lung-shaped piece of land south of Las Olas, at what is now the point where the New River meets the Intracoastal Waterway. Others quickly followed.

Boston developer W. F. Morang constructed the Seven Isles neighborhood along the Intracoastal north of Las Olas, erecting twin 40-foot columns at the neighborhood's entrance. But the great hurricane of 1926 knocked over the columns and caused real estate values to crash, putting a stop, temporarily, to the South Florida land boom.

Fort Lauderdale has evolved into a sophisticated city of slim condo towers, elegant yachts and fine restaurants.

And then there's the Jungle Queen.

This relic of the an earlier era still packs in the passengers as it plies the New River. The current 550-passenger behemoth evolved from a single-deck vessel that seated fewer than 100.

Founded by Al Starts in 1935, the original Jungle Queen competed with other boats taking tourists through the city's canals. Serving as a ferry in the 1930s and 40s, it was the only way for the city's black residents to reach the segregated beach in what is now John U. Lloyd Beach State Park.

Earl Faber, a former Vaudeville performer, bought the boat from Starts in 1958, and it has remained in his family ever since. His son, Jerome Charles Faber, who died last March at 83, operated the boats since the 1960s, insisting on only G-rated humor in the entertainment provided to passengers.

The narrated tours of the mansions of the rich and famous come with old-fashioned acts such as ventriloquists and magicians, and a barbecue dinner.